Rating: 
Summary: One Great Thought Beat to Death 190 Times
Review: There is one great thought in this book, i.e. that the Web makes it possible for everyone to participate in the "great conversation", and that it is the summing and slicing of these conversations that will drive business in the 21st Century. The authors are quite correct, and helpful, when they point out that in the aggregate, the combined preferences, insights, and purchasing power of all Web denizens is vastly more valuable and relevant to business decisions about production, quality, and services than any "push" marketing hype or engineering presumptions about what people might need. Sadly, the authors' neither provide an integrated understanding of the true terrain over which the great conversation takes place, nor do they provide any substantive suggestions for how web content managers might improve our access to the knowledge and desires that are now buried within the web of babel. Their cute "tell a story" and equally cute advice to have big boxes for customer stories in the forms provided for input, simply do not cut it with me. This book is a 5 for the one great idea, a 2 for beating the idea to death, a 3 for presentation, and a 4 overall because it was just good enough to keep me reading to the last page.
Rating: 
Summary: The end of business as usual
Review: Hard to recommend such a small publication when the entire thing is now available for download at the website.
Markets are conversations. This is good.
Mass marketing is not a conversation. That is bad.
The authors leave themselves open to some fair criticism - their ideas aren't fully developed nor are their any clear suggestions as to implementation. It reads more as a protestation against existing norms than a viable alternative.
Find a second-hand copy. It's worth a read but not quite worth the price.
Rating:
Summary: Catchy and interesting although repetitious
Review: I enjoyed reading this book...the authors had a lot of very enlightening points and they presented their material in a much more "down to earth", magazine style way than the average business book. Also, I felt that they spoke for the lower echelon of workers as much or more than they spoke for very tip of upper management. Their description of worker motivations and customer reactions was quite accurate. They captured the idea of the Internet being a tidal force in the marketplace very well... HOWEVER - they authors beat the dead horse WAY too much after the first 75 pages or so. I feel that the book could have been made much stronger by heavier editing - truly 20% of it could have been completely axed and we'd have all been better off for it... Overall, though, I highly recommend reading this book for its unique perspective on the Internet and how it may change business from both the customers' and employess' vantage points. When you feel that you might have read something before, you probably have...
Rating:
Summary: Not bad, but lots missing...
Review: I have mixed feelings about this book. At the beginning, it makes a lot of sense, with discussions about markets and the power of the Internet. Here it succeeds. The problem is that it runs out of steam. A lot of concepts are repeated over and over and some of them make less sense the more they are repeated. There are some good ideas about using the technology to reconnect with customers, co-workers and the world at large. The case histories are also quite illuminating. These guys have clearly been there and done it. The problem I have is that they think the Internet is somehow a magic cure for a lot of these problems. Technology by itself never fixes anything and I say this as someone who is an IT professional. I found it an interesting read, but was left wanting more from it in the end. Some of the observations about organisational hierarchy and culture I think are over simplified and at times plain wrong. As a companion to the book, I would recommend readers try "Good to Great" by Jim Collins, which deals with how some organisations make the jump and some don't. It's an interesting counterpoint, as it focusses a lot on effective management of people, any organisation's most valuable asset. Cluetrain is worth a read, but keep some salt handy....
Rating: 
Summary: If you've been asleep for the last four years, read this
Review: I think the target audience is somebody who completely missed out on the late nineties, but who would like a very light read to understand the change in openness and freedom in conversations that most folks now take for granted. There's not a lot of content here -- you can skim about 10% of the book and get seemingly 99% of the content. If you're really "clueless", hit the web version instead and save the effort of grabbing this book.
Rating:
Summary: Markets are not conversations.
Review: If you prefer Hotwired to The Economist, James Carville to David Brinkley, and Tom Peters to Peter Drucker, you will probably enjoy this book. It cheers the power of the Internet to create productive informal relationships between people. The book's primary message is "Markets are conversations." It should have been "Marketing is a conversation." Economic transactions are the exchange of information as well as economic goods and money. The authors are right to condemn the traditional tendency to focus too much on the exchange of economic goods for money. By overstating their case, the authors imply that we can safely ignore the exchange of economic goods and money. As many dot.com investors learned the hard way, dominating a particular conversational niche on the Internet does not automatically lead to success in business. As a book about marketing over the Internet, this book deserves four stars. As a book about Internet economics or information age management, it deserves none.
Rating: 
Summary: Five Stars. What more could I say in a title?
Review: Many people happen to think this is a great book and I think it's definitely something that many business majors could benefit from. I'd advise people who don't find this book to be of any use or to be "nothing more than the ramblings of a number of self-appointed dot-com smart guys who have little or no experience in the real world of profit and loss" to stick to lower level reading and I think I'm not alone here judging by the other reviewers. "How-to's" are probably what you should be grazing on, spiteful remarks notwithstanding. As all successful businessmen know, and there are still many on the Web, it takes creative thinking to implement vision in real-world manifestations and this book is a great starting place for spurring that kind of thinking -- the now-cliched "Thinking out of the box." Anybody would rather devote several years of their lives to a project that's original enough to succeed and taking the thoughts in this book to heart is a great way to help assure that.
Rating:
Summary: Yawn...this is soooooo 1999
Review: Markets are conversations. Uh huh. So what. Feeding the cat in the morning is a conversation as well, nobody is paying me a six-figure advance on that tidbit-o-wisdom. This book is very 1999. Yeah, the whole "Internet revolution" thing was a real turn on back then. Today, we know the reality. While the Internet may be a very cool thing that is transforming markets, its also full of a lot of self-important dipwads who think they have a bigger handle on the universe than the rest of us. The authors firmly believe that the Internet will infuse some kind of populist collectivism into the purchasing trends of consumers. The result will be some "new paradigm that fully leverages the best-of-breed synergies of real-time information distribution." Or some such nonsense. Unfortunately, as we now know, people are drooling semi-simian dolts who follow whatever carrot is placed in front of them. How else can you describe the leaders we elect to run this nation? All you have to do is push the masses in one direction and most will follow. Sure, some will go off a drive strange French cars and load Linux on to their X-box. Yet, the majority of consumers behave themselves and purchase what they are told to purchase from the local bulk-product distribution center. As such, this book's insights are only mildly interesting and accurate. While the whole "markets are conversations" thing sounds great to college professors and coffee house philosophers, it doesn't translate so cleanly to the suburban buying centers that drive the economy. This isn't a bad book, its just not terribly "revolutionary."
Rating:
Summary: Hello, are you reading this!
Review: Markets are converstions. When markets were created, the term market was a place where we came together to exchange goods and services, along with the stories of the grand ventures. Market was a place, not a verb. In the market people exchanged stories with their goods. The industrial complex built up. Things became automated. Supply and demand seperated. The web was created. The barriers between supply and demand erode. All along markets are conversations. Few businesses understand this, do you?
Rating:
Summary: Packed with Knowledge!
Review: The Cluetrain Manifesto was one of the seminal books of the dot.com bubble era, but reading it now is like waking with a hangover and looking at all of the empty bottles, each of which seemed like a great idea at the time. The Internet changed everything, all right. Those who can bite back the irony long enough to see the big picture and keep reading will find some valuable practical advice on using the now-not-so-new-technology of the Web to do business more effectively. We recommend this pivotal book for the sake of your sense of perspective (or to give you a critically necessary background if you are too young to remember when Amazon was just a river.)
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